Where is the API?

[lucidity]

Flickr, Smugmug etc all have an API for manipulating photos and galleries, making it easy for software developers to write plugins and other software to interface directly with them.

As far as I can tell PBase does not have an API. Thus any uploading or changes have to be done via HTTP post requests and getting gallery or photo information has to be done using either HTML scraping or the two XML commands srijith has previously posted about. This makes writing a decent plugin for any photo apps impossible.


I am wondering when or if PBase is going to implement an API?


Thanks
Ross

[klopus]

Yes, I wonder about same thing. Among paid sites PBase seems to become least feature rich, least configurable, most antiquated and, I'm afraid, least supported. PBase seems to be just frozen in time with hardly any substantial changes but with constant performance problems. It's even not the best value anymore. I've been a loyal user for more than few years but it gets harder and harder not to dump PBase in favor of SmugMug or Zenofolio. There's no easy theme support, no iPhone or Android apps. Very popular and useful JUploadr, Migratr and PixelPipe tools know tons of photo sites except for PBase. Heck, there's even no mobile version of the site. Paradoxically PBase's obscurity is what mostly still keeps me with it - my employer's firewall doesn't block PBase as opposed to most others photo sharing sites.

[venturabumm]

As the engineer for the iPhoto upload tool. Not having a full API is a bit of a pain. I am looking at doing an iphone browser, with upload to come later, and its all about parsing the HTML and mimicing the form posts for upload and galleries. Its one of the reasons iPhoto2PBase doesn't support creating password protected galleries it was just too hard. It supports 90% of gallery creation and upload functionality.

Having to also go this route is a pain because if the HTML or forms change, the app breaks.

[lucidity]

Yes not having an API is a real pain, and submitting via forms can be troublesome as if you leave out a bit of info the entire POST doesn't work.

It really does seem frozen in time though. There seems to be no real participation in the forums from the staff and the site is not taking advantage of web 2.0 technologies - e.g. uploading.

If the developers don't have the time or inclination to continue to develop the site, then please put it up for sale so someone can buy it and do the improving.

[venturabumm]

Now yes there is no API but introducing an API and getting things up to an Web 2.0/3.0 standard is no small feat for a site with this many galleries photos and not have things go wrong. It would be nice if they added the APIs on to the existing technologies or slowly introduced one. Being a software engineer i understand how its like being between a rock and a hard place.

[lucidity]

I wouldn't think that there would be too much difference between parsing a HTML POST request and parsing some XML, or returning some XML for a gallery instead of HTML.